
Qass F-j^ , 



li^iik Mr. iVmsors Complhnent 



THE 



Mayflower Town 



BY 



JUSTIN WINSOR 



THE MAYFLOWER TOWN. 



AN ADDRESS 



DELIVERED AT 



€l)e CtDO i^untireD ann fifttetl) annitierjsarF 



OF THE 



INCORPORATION OF THE TOWN OF DUXBURY, MASS., 
June 17, 1887. 



By JUSTIN WINSOR. 



CAMBRIDGE: 
JOHN WILSON AND SON. 

SSnitjersitg yrrss. 

1.SH7. 



Tivo liundred copies iwivatdy 'printed. 



ADDRESS. 



I PRAY you let the dissolving view of another scene 
* than this come to your inner vision. Picture your- 
selves at the doorstone of Miles Standish in the declining 
hours of a day in June, two centuries and a half ago. 
Gaze attentively upon the knots of people looking out 
upon the placid waters of yonder bay, and turning their 
eyes upon a mellowing sky beyond the Kingston Hills. 

You can hardly mistake the master of the house. His 
three-and-fiTty years have left some, if not heavy, marks 
upon a frame that in his j^ounger days had borne the 
severities of campaigns in regular armies, and in his 
sterner manhood had endured the rigors of the wilder- 
ness. But you can see that his face still has the volatile 
lines which mark a nature quick in passion. His eye has 
still the alertness and his motions the rapidity of those 
earlier days when he fought in Flanders, and of the later 
ones when he braved the braggart Pecksuot in the cabin 
at Wessagusset, or quelled by his daring the revolt of 
Corbitant. We know by the inventory of his books tliat 
the " Commentaries of Caesar " was a household volume ; 
and we may well conjecture how, with his children and 
Hobamok looking on, he could trace upon the sand, and 
place pebbles to mark, the marches and camps of the 
Roman Legions in Gaul. He was now, as he continued 



to be for a score of years yet left to hiii), trusted in the 
counsels of the civil government of the colony, and it 
may be upon his urgency in the Court of Assistants on 
the morrow that Duxbury is to enter upon her corporate 
existence. We may well imagine, in view of this con- 
templated action, how this little gathering of neighbors 
was formed as a last conference in the scant community, 
which for five years had been taking up its house-lots 
along the margin of the bay, and was now combining, 
after the promptings of their English birthright, to secure 
their own local government. 

Of the Court which was to decide upon their petition in 
the morning, there were others besides Standish who might 
well have attended this supposable conference. There 
was Edward Winslow, who had settled at Greenharbor, as 
Marshfield was then called, probably occupying a tem- 
porary summer shelter there at as early a period as when 
on the hillocks along the Duxbury shore others of the 
Plymouth people had begun to build their rude houses. 
It was just about the time which we are now considering 
that Winslow had built himself a more commodious 
lodging, in which he might dare to brave the winter, 
and had dignified his estate with a name associated with 
his ancestral line ; for he and Standish were the only 
ones df the first comers whose family stock seems to have 
been above the yeoman class. There was no definition 
yet of the bounds of the proposed new town ; and it was 
to surround if not to include Winslow's grant at Marsh- 
field, and to stretch, as was determined some years later, 
to the North River. Much the same reason had lured 
Winslow to make a permanent abiding place at Green- 



harbor as had brought Standish and the rest to settle 
along the Diixbury fields, and as three years later Winslow 
with his neighbors at Greenharbor were to seek incor- 
poration in the same way ; and as he was to make part 
of the Court to determine upon the application of those 
of Duxbury, we may well imagine him to have joined 
this probable group. The name which had been selected 
for the new town, and which for some years had been 
commonly applied to the settlement on this side of the 
bay, was a reminiscence of Standish's early days and of 
his connection with an ancestral line which centred its 
history in family estates in Lancashire, known to this day 
as Standish Hall and Duxbury Hall. The somewhat 
lordly promises of Standish's will for the benefit of his 
son Alexander and his descendants give a little pleasant 
flavor of baronial state to the decidedly democratic feeling 
of the early Plymouth records. It helps us to under- 
stand the two somewhat opposing phases of Standish's 
character, — the sympathetic, companionable nature that 
impelled him into the simple ways and homely fortunes 
of the Pilgrims, and that reserve and perhaps hauteur of 
individualism which never forgot his inherited rights. 

Standish seems, if we may trust the records, to have 
brought to the Pilgrim store small riches compared with 
that somewhat profuse wealth which his will represents 
him as having been surreptitiously deprived of ; or at least 
he stands on the lists of rate-payers of the little colony far 
below Winslow and Collier, the other members of the 
Court of Assistants for this year, from this part of the bay 
and beyond. Riches to these early settlers consisted not 
so much in land as in the abilitv to work it, in the cattle 



they could feed, and in the merchandise they could order 
from England. Now that the settlements of Massachusetts 
Bay were well established and prospering, the Plymouth 
people, — who had largely increased their herds and flocks 
from the small importation of three heifers and a bull, 
which had been brought over in 1624, — found a quick 
sale for any surplus in the necessities of the Massachusetts 
people ; and Bradford offers serious complaint that the 
accumulation of riches, and the methods to that end, were 
making sad changes in the quiet, self-centred little com- 
munity which but a few years before had made the town 
of Plymouth homogeneous and content. This increase of 
their stock had induced them to move farther and farther 
from the town to find pasturage ; and where a summer 
sojourn had sufficed at first, a permanence of settlement, 
provided with all the relief and aids by which the winter 
coidd be combated, necessarily soon followed, breaking up 
connections with the parent church at Plymouth, and at 
one time causing almost the desertion of that town. It 
was not without grievous presentiments of evils to come in 
this train of events, that Bradford records these beginnings 
of the towns of Dux bury and Marshfield. His fears that 
the division of the church would lead to political indepen- 
dence in local affairs was only too evident some years be- 
fore it came ; and Bradford must confront the inevitable 
issue at the sitting of the Court on the next day, for which 
this little conference was preparing. 

Plymouth had in fact by this time ceased to be the 
chief home of the " Mayflower " Pilgrims. Bradford was 
the only one of the first comers of much consideration 
remaining in that town. It stirred him deeply to find 



how the chief men had abandoned the places which had 
been hallowed by their early sufferings. Brewster, Stand- 
ish, Winslow, Alden, Ilowland, and two of their compan-. 
ions in that fateful voyage of whom we hear less, George 
Soule and Henry Sampson, — everyone was now living 
on the Duxbury side and adjacent. Of those who had 
come later, Collier and Prince' and the sons of Brewster 
were their neighbors here. What Plymouth thus early 
lost she has never regained ; and the " Mayflower " blood 
in the male lines, except as descendants of these Duxbury 
settlers have returned to the old home, make no longer 
an appreciable part of her population. I recall how forty 
3'ears ago, as a boy, smitten with the love of genealogy, I 
traced down the widening lines of descent from the " May- 
flower," and found, as it seemed to me, half the people of 
this town possessed of the strain of the Pilgrim blood. 

Of more marked bearing, perhaps, than either Standish 
or Winslow, is he who is the eldest by much of all who 
are gathered before us, and whose memory goes back foi- 
nearly seventy years. How should we like to-day that 
instrument, which the scientists say we may one day pos- 
sess, to take from the air still palpitating with the undu- 
lating words of this reverend man his discourse, as he 
stands there in reverie, turning aside it may be at times 
to impart to Ralph Partridge, the new-come minister of the 
town, the shifting visions of the past ! There was, indeed, 
little in the scene before him, — the waters streaked with 
the vagrant breezes, the rosy flush that lay over the dis- 
tant hills of Plymouth, the purple mass of Manomet, and 
the woody headland of the Gurnet peering above the dusky 
outline of yonder island, — little in all this to bring back. 



8 

except by contrast, that village of Scrooby, in Nottingham- 
shire, where he passed his childhood. Think for a mo- 
ment of this aged Christian teacher, and of this doughty 
soldier, passing among his guests and coming to the other's 
side, and of the contrasts and startling visions which 
might have come and gone, dissolving in their minds, — 
Brewster, who might well have copied for Secretary 
Davison, his master, the death-warrant of the Catholic 
Mary Queen of Scots ; and Standish, with his recollec- 
tions of the campaigns in Flanders, where, scion of a 
Catholic stock himself, we are told that his sword had 
been wielded against the Spanish Romanists ! Think, 
again, how the hoary associations of the storied halls along 
the Cam might have poured upon the mind of Brewster, 
as he recalled his life at the English university, when at 
Peterhouse College nearly sixty years before he had laid the 
foundations of a learning which for many years was the 
most considerable possessed by any among the Pilgrims. 
As we look upon him now he seems almost like a relic of a 
by-gone generation. The courtiers he had met, the scholars 
he had known, must have come and gone in his memory 
like the stalking shapes of a dream. We can imagine how 
in his moments of reminiscence, as his thoughts went back 
to the friends of his early manhood, his heart if not his foot 
trod the Bay Path to the Massachusetts settlements, over 
which Partridge had so lately travelled. This new-comer 
could tell him how the colleges of Cambridge and Oxford 
had within these seven years sent their most heroic souls 
into this neighboring wilderness. But nearly all these 
men were quite a generation the juniors of Brewster. 
Partridge could tell him of a contemporary at the Univer- 



9 

sity, — Nathaniel Ward, — and of the beginning of his 
ministry at Agawam in the Massac hnsetts, where his active 
inteUigence made him a few years later the draftsman of 
the " Body of Liberties " of that sturdier colony. Par- 
tridge could tell him, too, of the men of his own college, 
Trinity ; and every message from the Bay brought word of 
what John Cotton had said in Boston, or Thomas Welde in 
Roxbury, or Hugh Peters in Salem. Brewster could point 
to a fellow collegian of Peterhouse — long after him to be 
sure — in John Norton, to whom they had listened in 
Plymouth for the winter, a year or two before. 

Recall, if you will, some of the other names which 
Massachusetts preserves, bearing thither from the Univer- 
sity of Cambridge the memories of her halls, and awak- 
ening in the breast of William Brewster the tender affilia- 
tions of fellowship in learning, as he heard of their coming 
to carry a stout heart, and to press on with simple, earnest 
endeavor in breaking out the primordial pathways of a 
nation. The Pilgrims' shallop, as it explored the coast to 
the northward, must have brought to him word, even be- 
fore the coming of Winthrop, of that mysterious recluse, 
WilHam Blaxton, who pre-empted in 1625 the site of the 
future Boston. Other Cambridge men whose wandering 
hither was not unknown to him were Francis Higginson, 
of Salem ; Roger Williams, who but a year or two before 
the time we are now considering had fled from Salem to 
Plymouth, to be hardly more welcome there with the u|> 
heavals of his instincts ; Thomas Hooker, who had but 
a twelvemonth before led a migrating community from the 
banks of the Charles to the valley of the Connecticut, — 
a migration not without influence, as we shall see, uj)on 



10 

the vote to be passed to-morrow ; the godly Shepard, who 
had taken the place which Hooker had left, little suspect- 
ing then that the unknown John Harvard, bringing with 
him the Puritanism of Emmanuel, at this very moment, 
when Brewster's reverie might have turned his spiritual eye 
to the future of learning in New England, was crossing 
the Atlantic with a dream of the great university shadowy 
in his mind, and bearing among his books, as we know 
from the list preserved in the College records, the Essays 
of John Robinson, the pastor of the Pilgrims. 

To a man of Brewster's learning, as Bradford describes it 
■ to us, the coming of Ralph Partridge to him as a neighbor 
must have produced grateful recollections of the associations 
of Cambridge in contrast to a time twenty years later than 
his own, and when Puritanism had made Enunanuel its 
stronghold. He could well remember how at Peterhouse 
he had acquired in the first instance his Puritan tendency, 
and how, as he left Cambridge for more stirring fields, it 
was still under the Puritan diplomatist Davison that he 
got his first glimpses of the Low Countries, so that when 
some years later he went thither into exile it was not to a 
land wholly unknown to him. It was this same Puritan 
Davison who later interceded to get him the office of 
postmaster in his native village, which his father had held 
before him, and which, through the control that it gave 
him of relays on the great post-route to the north, offered 
him a position of not a little local importance. Here it 
was in the habitable portion of an ancient manor-house of 
the archbishops of York, the postmaster William Brew- 
ster passed nearly twelve years of his early uiaturity, — 
years which proved to be the turning-point of his life. 



11 

The motive and effect of that change of life, which had 
heretofore known its due share of the bustle of the worhl, 
we can well understand when we read that tribute to his 
character which has come down to us from the pen of 
Bradford, and which enables us from what he was in this 
cardinal period of his life to conjecture the man he was 
to become in the ripening of time. His friend tells us of 
Brewster's grave and deliberate utterance ; of his humble, 
modest, and inoffensive demeanor; of his cheerful spirit, 
not dismayed by trial, and always rising above the worst 
that could beset him ; and of his tenderness, particularly for 
those who had been driven to extremities for which their 
life had not prepared them. If such was the native char- 
acter of the man, it is not surprising that when that flock of 
English folk scattered about Scrooby in the three counties 
of Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire, and Yorkshire had been 
drawn together and needed a friend earnest to protect 
them, they found one in William Brewster. The pity he 
felt for an inoffensive, humble people harried by the min- 
ions of the law, very easily became, as it happened, joined 
to the admiration which he could feel for such a servitor 
and minister as they had in John Robinson. This pastor 
and his principal follower were sharers by nature in all 
that was tender, tolerant, and hopeful in their religious 
feelings. Of Robinson's scholarship, — for he too was of 
Cambridge, though a dozen years later than Brewster, — his 
companion was to know the deepest and to honor the broad- 
est part. Tt was through Brewster's welcome in his ancient 
manor-house that Robinson and his flock now found a place 
of meeting, when by stealth, or as best they could, they met 
for mutual comfortings and for the service of prayer. 



12 

We may well suppose that Partridge listened to a story 
like this with the interest natural to one whom fortune had 
thrown among a people who had found a common in- 
heritance in all the tender recollections of such a life as 
the older of the first comers had experienced. He could 
but see in the veneration felt for their ancient elder that 
the wisdom of Brewster, as it had been the guide of his 
neighbors, must be his own in his ministration to this 
people in the coming years. From Brewster he must 
learn their individual traits ; he must know the joys and 
miseries of each household, the aspirations of one person, 
the estrangements of another ; and he must walk with him 
among the graves at Harden Hill, and listen to the com- 
pletion of the family histories in the enumerations of those 
that are gone. 

I cannot now detail the whole course of that story 
which Brewster must have told to his new helper when- 
ever he easily reverted, as old men do, to the memories of 
their younger days ; of the imprisonment which lie suf- 
fered ; of the flight with the congregation of Scrooby to 
Holland, — first to Amsterdam, where they found other 
English who had preceded them, and in whose contro- 
versies over the questions of bodices and high heels they 
were little inclined to join as a thing worth the enduring 
of exile. Brewster must have told him how they parted 
with their less spiritual countrymen and passed on to 
Leyden, destined to be so long their home. You know 
the straits to which they submitted, — poverty, and hard 
labor for a living ; but never forgetting the land which 
drove them forth. They who, as Bradford said, had been 
used " to a plain country life and the innocent trade of hus- 



13 

bandry," were thus thrown into a strange city and forced 
to learn a strange tongue. We can well imagine how 
Partridge, who had been a Church of England clergyman, 
would listen to this wonderful story, — of Robinson hold- 
ing all together by his tact and by his love ; of his gaining 
the respect of the Leyden University, which is illustrious 
with the names of Armiiiius, Scaliger, and Grotius ; of his 
publicly disputing with the professors, when he had been 
honored with membership of their learned body ; and of 
his contributing by his acquirements and sweetness to 
that repute which they enjoyed with the Dutch, and which 
the honesty and orderliness of the less learned among 
these outcast English helped to intensify. Brewster might 
well revert to his honorable calling then as a schoolmaster, 
teaching English through the Latin to Dutch, Dane, or 
German, as either required it. He might also recount how 
when later in their sojourn a young English gentleman had 
joined them, bringing doubtless some little ca})ital to work 
with, so that Brewster and Winslow (perchance this same 
gentleman comes up now to the front to listen to the recital) 
could set up a press and print for clandestine introduc- 
tion into England the doctrinal books and tracts that the 
licensers of the English press had prohibited. 

Standish himself might have joined in the talk too, 
and told what we to-day would be glad to know,— just 
how he chanced to join this exiled people. It has been 
claimed of late years with some show of plausibility by Dr. 
Shea, the most eminent of the native Catholic writers on 
American history, that the fact (uncontroverted I believe) 
that Standish never became covenanted with the Pdgruu 
Church, coupled to the other fact (equally unchallenged 



14 

I think) that he belonged to a Lancashire family, then as 
now one of the well-known Catholic families of the realm, 
afforded ground for holding the Duxbury captain to be 
one of that faith. These facts do not certainly prove it, 
nor yet is the allegation positively disproved by anything 
we know. If Standish were a Catholic, it may or may not 
have been known to his leading associates in the colony. 
To suppose they knew it, and because of his helpfulness 
to have ignored it, is but a step further than to have 
trusted him as they did when he was without the pale of 
their covenant. If Bradford had survived him to write 
his character as he wrote Brewster's, we might possibly 
have been informed. As it is, we inherit a mystery. 

But, see ! there is a new comer to our Leyden group. 
Who is that fair and rosy woman, bewitching one may 
well believe her to be, as she dismounts from the pillion 
behind John Alden, greets Barbara Standish, — the Cap- 
tain's wife, — as she trips along in the early develop- 
ment of her matronly comeliness, glancing at the Captain 
himself, in remembrance of the incident which Longfellow 
has immortalized, and draws near to pay her affectionate 
homage to Elder Brewster, — who but that Priscilla who 
so witchingly said, " Prithee, why don't you speak for 
yourself, John ? " She makes in the group a new element, 
for in her veins courses the blood of the Huguenots ; and 
out of the Church of the Walloons in Leyden came the 
names of Molines, changed to Mullins, and Delanoye, 
which we now know as Delano. 

And so in these years of their exile in Holland the Pil- 
grim Church grew to about three hundred souls; but with 
all their outward prosperity there was a spirit of unrest. 



15 

It grieved tlieir English hearts to see their young men 
growing up with foreign ways, marrying Dutch maidens 
and joining the Dutch marine. The truce of Holland 
with Spain, soon to expire, might bring u})on them the 
clash of arms in a country not their own. They said to 
one another, " Let us go hence to save this English blood 
of ours." " Let us go and carry Christ to the New World," 
said Edward Winslow. 

There is no time to-day to rehearse the story which the 
narrative of Bradford has made clear to us, of the hard 
bargain which some English merchants forced upon them 
in their negotiations for the money necessary for their 
transfer to America. Here in William Collier is one of 
those same London merchants who could tell us the whole 
story. He is one of the two or three of the seventy 
merchants who had heart enough in the migration to 
come over to share its burdens; and he had already 
settled, in company with Prince and Jonathan Brewster, 
along the line of what we know as the shore road to 
Kingston. Prince had married a daughter of Collier, 
as had also Love Brewster, another son of the Elder. 
William Brewster himself had participated in those coun- 
sels for the outfit, but we cannot follow them now. 
Hard as the terms were, they were accepted ; and such 
of them as were to part with the major portion of the 
Church that remained behind with Robinson passed their 
last night in Leyden with feasting and psalms. AVho 
would not wish that we had preserved to us in his very 
words the farewell address which Robinson made to them ; 
but it unfortunately has only come down to us as it floated 
in the memory of Edward Winslow many years later, — 



16 

with its exalted tenderness, its far-seeing wisdom, and its 
lofty, tolerant purpose. 

We may suppose Brewster to have retired with the 
falling dews to his home, and to have left Alden to rehearse 
to Partridge the continuance of the story. There were 
three of the " Mayflower " settlers now in Duxbury who 

^ belonged to the class of which Alden was the most con- 
spicuous member, — unless, perhaps, John Rowland be 
excepted. These were men not of the Leyden stock, but 
hired by the company, or apprenticed or bound to some 
of the leading men at their immigration. In this way, 
though at coming a man of twenty-seven, John Rowland 
was a member of Governor Carver's family ; George Soule, 
at this time soon to become a settler at Powder Point and 
the ancestor of a numerous family of that name, was bound 
to Edward Winslow ; and Henry Sampson, a lad of six" 
years at coming, was under the care of his cousins Edward 
Tilley and wife, both of whom died in that first grievous 
winter, while the youth Sampson had been at this time 
a year married, and was to become the ancestor of a 
numerous family, — though not of all bearing the name. 

- The one person of this class whom Bradford singles out 
for commendation is John Alden. He tells us that he 
was hired for a cooper in Southampton, v^^here the " May- 
flower" fitted, "and being a hopeful young man," he adds, 
" was much desired, but left to his own liking to go or 
stay when he came here [to Plymouth] ; but he stayed 
and married here," and what that marriage with his fair 
Priscilla produced, the genealogical tables of numerous 
descendants abundantly make plain. 



17 

We can imagine Alden now explaining to Partridge, tlie 
new minister, how he was pursuing his trade in Southamp- 
ton when the " Mayflower " came round from London with 
such of the Pilgrims as had gathered there to join in the 
voyage ; and to these Londoners we can probably trace the 
London designation of landmarks, which in my boyhood 
were and perhaps still are familiar in this town, — Black- 
friar's Brook, Billingsgate, Hound's Ditch, and the rest. 
Alden could tell how the little " Speedwell " had followed 
her into port for the rendezvous, freighted with the heavy 
souls made indeed the lighter for the benedictions of 
Robinson. He would tell of the conference there, when 
he first came in contact with the noble spirits among 
whom his life was to be cast ; of the trials which he saw 
them endure as the merchants whom they had trusted 
for succor turned their backs upon them ; of their departure 
at last, and of their fears of the smaller ship ; their return 
to Dartmouth for repairs, their venturing again, their seek- 
ing a harbor once more at Plymouth on the Devonshire 
coast, their abandonment of the " Speedwell," their final 
start with all that the " Mayflower " could hold crowded 
in her narrow quarters, their voyage and its mishaps. He 
could tell of the beam of the deck sprung out of place by 
the storm that forced them to take in everv sail, and how 
they succeeded in raising it into place by an iron screw 
which they had brought from Holland ; how John How- 
land by a lurch of the ship had been hurled into the sea, 
and by good luck rescued to live many years, as Bradford 
says in describing the incident, and to become " a profitable 
member both in Church and Commonwealth." 

You remember they were bound under the patent which 



18 

they had received from the old Virginia Company to find 
land somewhere in the neighborhood of Hudson River, per- 
haps on the Connecticut, perhaps on the Jersey coast; and it 
is almost equally certain that they had with them the map 
of the New England coast which John Smith had made 
when he examined its bays and headlands six years before, 
and had later published with the native names displaced 
by the English ones marked by Prince Charles on the 
draught which the engraver followed. So when at last 
they sighted land they knew it by the description to be 
the sand-hills of that point which was called on Smith's 
map Cape James, after the Prince's royal father, but 
which the mariners who had been on the coast before, — 
and they had such among the crew, — told them was 
nevertheless known by those who frequented the region 
for traffic with the Indians by the designation which 
Captain Gosnold had given it eighteen years before, when 
he was surprised at the numbers of fish which he found 
thereabouts, and called it Cape Cod. As soon as it became 
evident where they were, they turned to the south to seek 
the place of their destination ; but before long getting 
among the shoals off Nauset, and fearing that after all 
their tribulations they were running too great hazards to 
proceed, they turned once more northward, and rounding 
the head of the Cape came at last to anchor in the shelter 
of what we know now as Provincetown harbor. 

I fear that the visitor, who stands on yonder hill and 
reads inscribed on the base of that monument the names 
of those who came in the " Mayflower," associates them 
all with that Paith which is typified in the statue above 
them ; but the scrutiny of the historian can lay his finger 



19 

upon more than one name in tlie list which stands for 
little of that sublimating virtue, for such names belong to 
men thrown fortuitously among them, — hired men, or 
forced into the company by the cupidity of the merchants 
who backed their undertaking on its mercantile side. 
There were honorable exceptions among this class of the 
" Mayflower" company; and we can see here in John Alden, 
John Howland, and George Soule those w^hose hopefulness 
of character made them soon take on the Pilgrims' spirit. 
But with John Smith's map spread out before them on 
the deck of the " Mayflower," and finding that stress of 
weather and the lateness of the season had rendered it 
necessary to cease the attempt to find a haven within the 
privileges of their patent, and that they were brought 
beyond the pale of the delegated authority which that 
patent vested in their leaders, on territory not within the 
bounds of such necessary control, — it was then that 
mutterings from some at least of these same hired men 
and apprentices, eager to make the most of their freedom 
which chance had seemingly given them, made it necessary 
to draft that immortal compact, wherein by the subscrip- 
tion of all this band of exiles, in the very spirit of their 
religious independence, took on themselves the power of a 
body politic, fit to govern themselves and compel the sub- 
jection of any that were evil disposed. Look around this 
little group, and see who among them are left of those 
that signed that fundamental example of constitutional 
government, — William Brewster, Miles Standish, Edward 
Winslow, John Alden, John Howland, George Soule, — 
all here in Duxbury, and all except Soule men of the first 
consideration in the colony, of whom Alden was destined 



20 

to be the latest survivor of all the signers, including 
the four others then living in Plymouth, — Bradford and 
Stephen Hopkins; with two of less consideration, — 
Francis Cooke and Edward Doten. 

As a student of American history, I have often thought 
that of all the documents connected with that theme there 
were two I would give most to see. One is that early 
draught of the New World, making part of a map of the four 
quarters of the earth, drawn by Leonardo da Vinci, who of 
all men seemed easiest to stretch his vision to the periphery 
of all knowledge and of all mental capability, — drawn by 
Da Vinci, and bearing upon it, so far as existing original 
records can demonstrate, the written name of America, 
for the first time in human history. That paper it was 
my fortune, some years since, to gaze upon, in the cabinet 
of the Queen at Windsor. The other document, transcend- 
ing for us even in interest this of Da Vinci, — not that I 
would measure anj- nanie upon it with his in its superlative 
glory, but that they are significant, for us at least, above all 
others in the history of constitutional government, — is this 
bit of paper which bears this business-like and comprehen- 
sive compact, this germ that has grown till the branches 
of the tree have covered a vast continent, this experiment 
which has riveted the attention of students of political sci- 
ence everywhere. But, alas ! no one of this generation, no 
one of any generation within our record since the first comers 
themselves, has looked upon it ; and even to this little group, 
which we are, as it were, among to-day, and which may be 
now recalling it, it doubtless never had any interest beyond 
the few months when, as a temporary expedient, it served 
them as the foundation and guaranty of their liberties. 



21 

Thus have we stood in our coiniuiuiioii face to ftice for 
a while with these builders of a people's fame ; and as the 
sun goes down and they separate for their homes, — Wins- 
low, we may be sure, remaining for the night with Stan- 
dish, for he must accompany him to Plymouth in the 
morning, — we can ponder on their fidelity to the charac- 
teristics of race which they had brought with them from 
the Old World, giving never a thought to the ideas which 
have so perplexed the modern students of institutional 
history as to the origin of the methods of local government 
with which they were to be so soon clothed, and ftdling 
into the ways of that little democracy, the New England 
town, as easily as traditions are exemplified in conduct, 
and experience moulds what inheritance suggests. 

And so the night fell upon the little comnumity. The 
reddened sky of the west had paled in the gloaming. 
The full orb of our satellite had risen above the beach, and 
the moon-glade trembled athwart the bay. Tread lightly 
with me as we enter the habitation of their sainted Elder. 
Pause with me as we see him at his solitary devotion. The 
glimmer of the eastern herald quivers on the lifting waves 
of his thin and silvered locks, as the gentle air from the 
tide enters the window of his chamber. Governor Brad- 
ford, his most reverent disciple, has told us of the singular 
felicity of invocation which belonged to this pious man ; 
and I seem to catch the cadence, far off" and musical, of 
that tremulous voice, — 

Father, near to all thy creatures, 

Howe'er distant is their lot, 
With thy vesture falling round us 

And thy mercies failing not, — 



22 

In our exile have we planted 

Precious seed upon this soil, 
And are waiting for the harvests 

To be garnered for our toil ; 
In our living are our crosses 

Kneaded by thee like to leaven, 
For we know that we are pilgrims, 

And our dearest countr}^ heaven ! 

Give this people, as thy chosen. 
What of chastisement they need. 

That for them thy gentle finger 
Stanch their bruises as they bleed ; 

May their best endeavor prosper 
As they buckle for the fight, 

If they move along the pathway 
On the stepping-stones of right. 

Let not all the noonday visions 

Which their proud ambitions form. 
With the hopes of coming glories 

Which on eager spirits swarm. 
Make them heedless, as they wander. 

Of thy never-erring grace, 
Of thy hand that e'er sustaineth 

In the lifting of a race, — 
Make them heedless of the glory 

Of the Lord and all his hosts, 
Till they barter Zion's mountain 

For the httleness of boasts. 

Grant them solace in this midnioht, 
Groping for thy garment's hem. 

Watching in Orion's glory 
For Jehovah's diadem ! 



Brilliantly rose the sun on tlie next morning. Standisli 
and his guest were early astir, and as they stood on the 
bank above the tide the two formed a picturesque group. 
Winslow, despite the cloak and the peaked hat and the 
matchlock upon which he leaned, had something of the 
air of the courtly gentleman, as we see it in that portrait 
which hangs to-day in Pilgrim Hall, — the only indisput- 
able likeness which has come down to us of a " Mayflower " 
pilgrim. Standish wore his leathern doublet, his broad 
band athwart his breast sustaining that sword of the 
Oriental inscription along its blade which has puzzled 
modern scholars, his hose above his buckled shoes dis- 
closing the ribbed muscle of his calf. lie handled ner- 
vously the fowling-piece, which the inventory at his death 
shows us was found among his effects, and which came 
easily to his shoulder as he sighted a flock of dipping crows 
among his young corn. The harried birds rose flapping, 
and flecked the sky as they surged away to the tall clump 
of whitewood trees which gave the name of Eagle's Nest 
to the vicinity of Elder Brewster's homestead, and some 
of whose gaunt and bleached trunks I remember to have 
heard in my youth old people say that they recalled. 
Coming along the lower slope of the hill three persons 
approached. Two of them were Thomas Prince, who 
lived within sight, and Timothy Hatherly, who had come 
frojn Scituate, both knowing they could find passage in 
the Captain's boat. 

Here then these four with Collier, — who lived also 
within sight, but was debarred coming, — constituted the 
larger part of the Court which was this day to decide 
important questions for the little colony in Plymouth, 



24 

where the Governor and John Jeniiey, the other assist- 
ant, were expecting their coming, Hobaniok, the Indian 
who for sixteen years had been an attendant upon Standish 
and a companion in his wanderings, joined the group, 
as he carried the head of a wolf which he had recently 
killed, and which he was taking to Plymouth to claim 
his reward of five bushels of corn. The magistrates en- 
tered the boat, Hobamok pushed at the prow, there was 
a prolonged grating of the keel, and as the little craft slid 
off into deeper water the sail was hoisted, and in the fresh 
southerly breeze she bore away towards the channel over 
against Clark's island. On its welcome shore two at least 
of this little company had landed from the " Mayflower's " 
shallop on that fearful night in December, 16.20 ; when, en- 
tering by the Gurnet's nose in a driving snow-storm, they 
barely succeeded in bringing their reeling boat under the 
lea of this island, where they passed two days and held 
their first religious service. Standish and Winslow might 
well remember the explorations of the next day, when 
they discovered that they were on an island. They could 
tell the others how they had recourse to Smith's map to 
see where they were. Before they left the " Mayflower," 
then lying in Cape Cod harbor, that map had told them 
how over against them on the mainland was a harbor with 
a considerable island in it, since Smith had so drawn it, 
and Prince Charles had called the spot Plymouth. The 
name could but ha\e reminded them of the Devonshire 
Plymouth, the last English port they had left. But Smith, 
as we now know, had not made the only map of the harbor 
which had been engraved before this. There is no likeli- 
hood, however, that the Pilgrims ever knew any other. 



25 

Hobainok may well have remembered Smith's visit, and 
that of Dermer, who only the year before the Pilgrims 
came had been in the harbor to find that between Smith's 
visit and his — an interval of five years — a plague 
had swept off, hardly without an exception, the native 
villages which were scattered round the bay. Dermer 
had brought back to his native woods Hobamok's old 
rival for the good-will of the English, Squanto, who had 
been kidnapped by one of Smith's captains, and had had 
a little experience of civilized life in Europe in the mean 
time, and had acquired some knowledge of English, which 
gave him at first a certain advantage over Hobamok. 

The other map to which I refer was Champlain's, which 
he made on a visit in 1605, quite within the memory of 
Hobamok ; but the Pilgrims would probably have been 
as much surprised as their Indian friend to learn that 
while they were in Leyden a map of their harbor had been 
issued in Paris, in 1613, — not very accurate to be sure, 
but still as near the truth as the explorer's maps of that 
time were likely to be. 

We may imagine our Captain's boat long before noon 
making her way where the deepest water lies, and bump- 
ing her stem against the very rock on which this same 
exploring party, whom we have thought of on yonder island, 
had landed, when on Monday after their Sabbath's rest 
they touched for the first time the mainland of the harbor. 
It is altogether improbable that Standish and his com- 
panions, landing there again as we may suppose on the 
17th of June, 1637, had any suspicions that the name- 
less boulder on which they stopped would become historic, 
— such at least is the inference which we may naturally 



26 

draw from the absence of any mention of it by any of the 
Pilgrims themselves. As they passed from the landing 
up the way which now bears the name of their Leyden 
home, the memories of that first winter might throng upon 
them. Here on the left what recollections clung to the 
Common House, built in their first month ! How up this 
incline they dragged the great guns from the " Mayflower " 
to mount them on the hill ! Standish could tell how at 
one time he and Brewster, and four or five others, were the 
only ones left able to succor the many sick. Winslow 
could tell how he went to yonder hill across the brook to 
meet Massasoit, and to make through Squanto's help the 
treaty that brought peace between the English and the 
natives, and kept it for fifty years. Up the slope of 
the hill Standish could see the spot where he had first 
built his cabin ; and close at hand was Alden's early home, 
before he had removed and built his house at the Bluefish, 
in Duxbury. Beyond and above stood the level-roofed 
fort with the cannon upon it, — not the same in appearance 
as it had been, for it had just been strengthened and 
enlarged, since there were rumors of war, as we shall 
soon see. 

The magistrates stopped at the door of the Governor's 
house, where two halberdiers stood without, making 
a suitable state for the little colony on its court day. 
Standish, we may be sure, got the salute which he claimed, 
as with the others he entered the house. It was not 
long before, in the Governor's study, — for Bradford's 
inventory shows that his books were not few, and his 
nephew tells us of the room which contained them, — the 
dignified little Court proceeded to " handle business," as 



27 

the phrase with them went. It is one of the remarkable 
phases of Plymouth Colony, that with very little of the 
paraphernalia of a code of laws they set to work to de- 
velop a practical autonomy, which answered every pur- 
pose through the seventy years of the colony's independent 
existence. Judge Story refers to the brevity and the 
fewness of their laws ; and while allowing for the narrow 
limits of the population and the scant business of the 
colony as being in some measure the cause of it, he 
contends that this simplicity was in a large degree owing 
to their reliance upon the general principles of the 
English Common Law. 

What the magistrates did during tlie meeting to which 
we have now brought them is a fair example of their 
ways in legislation, as done in this all-sufficient court of 
the Governor and five " justices of the peace of our 
sovereign lord the King and assistants in the govern- 
ment," — as the record reads. To understand the sig- 
nificance of all that was done at this meeting, while they 
make to this town the grant running after the fashion of 
the time, " to be holden of our sovereign lord the King,, 
as of his manor and tenure of East Greenwich in the 
County of Kent," with a due reservation of gold and 
silver ore, — to understand this consummation, we must 
take for a moment a view of the somewhat broader re- 
lations of the colony, and see how these contributed to 
hasten, or at least to make compatible with existing 
circumstances, the incorporation of Duxbury. 

We remember that as the Pilgrims began in their excur- 
sions by land and water to know the country better, they 
had gradually come to doubt whether on the whole they 



28 

had been wise in the selection of a spot for their settlement. 
It was greatly in its favor, as they were aware, that the 
immediate country was without Indian occupants, since the 
plague had swept it so thoroughly ; and they could but re- 
joice in the friendly sentiments of the Wampanoags, their 
nearest native neighbors, and of Massasoit their chief. 
Still the soil they ploughed hardly gave the promise which 
they saw in it on that bright day when, after landing on 
the rock, their exploring party strayed back into the land 
and found " divers cornfields and little rumiing brooks," 
which seemed inviting even under a winter's aspect. In the 
seventeen years during which their acquaintance with the 
country, then as now called New England, had been widen- 
ing, there was no region into which they had pushed for 
exploration and trade that on the whole pleased them so 
much as the valley of the Connecticut. Not long after the 
settlement of Boston, seven years before this, a sachem of 
that country had come to the Massachusetts people and to 
Plymouth, with an invitation to send colonists among his 
people. It turned out, indeed, that the Peqnods, who lived 
not far off from this sachem, were making inroads upon the 
tribes of the Connecticut, and that the latter were more in 
want of allies than of neighbors, though they did not pro- 
fess it. The Massachusetts people declined the invitation ; 
but Winslow, then governor of Plymouth, had heard from 
some of his own adventurous people, who in their pinnace 
had been up the river to trade, of the goodness of the soil 
and of the otherwise pleasant look of the valley. The 
Plymouth governor was enough satisfied with the pro- 
posal to visit the country himself, whence he brought 
away favorable impressions. There were rumors at 



29 

the time that the Dutch from Manhattan were intend- 
ing by occupation to enforce their right to the territory ; 
and to prevent this was held to be of so much conse- 
quence, thatWinslow and Bradford had gone to Boston 
to urge a joint occupation by Plymouth and the Bay. 
Winthrop, however, pleaded various reasons in oppo- 
sition, among them poverty, — which in the light of 
the meagre treasury of the older colony was not very 
convincing. So the Plymouth people were left to or- 
ganize the enterprise alone, and to send out a vessel 
laden with the frame of a house, and to set it up on the 
river as the beginning of a trading-post. The Dutch, 
however, had anticipated them, and as the Plymouth 
vessel approached the site of the modern Hartford, the 
Hollanders turned the cannon of their fort upon it ; 
but they hesitated to fire, as the little sloop pushed 
boldly by. At a place above, where is now the town 
of Windsor, the adventurers bought of the Indians a 
tract of land, and erecting their house they began 
tradintr for furs. There were later symptoms of ani- 
mosity on the part of the Dutch, but it did not go to 
the length of violence ; and we know not how much 
the old-time relations of the two peoples in Leyden 
may have had to do with the forbearance. 

Already the success of the Windsor settlement had 
begun to turn the eyes of the Plymouth people to the 
more inviting bottom lands of the Connecticut. We 
have seen how, because of the increase of their cattle 
and flocks, they had in search of pasturage made in the 
first place summer sojourns along the Duxbury side 
of the bay, which were naturally soon converted into 



30 

permanent abodes. By 1632 it had become desirable 
for these distant worshippers to think of organizing a 
church for themselves, which was permitted under 
Brewster's paternal care; but the Court insisted that 
settlers so far distant from the protection of the Ply- 
mouth fort should be, every man of them, armed ; and 
in a short time their houses were palisaded, and a con- 
siderable defence of this nature was built across the 
entrance to what we know as the Nook. We find, in 
1632, Standish, Prince, Alden, and Jonathan Brewster 
signing an agreement to return to Plymouth in the 
winter. It was thus early with tlie formation of their 
church that Duxbury became the first offshoot from 
the Plymouth stock. The church at Scituate was the 
second, in 1634, though from the greater remoteness of 
that region it was given its civil independence a year 
earlier than Duxbury. 

I have referred to the apprehension which Bradford 
felt, that this scattering of the people might hazard the 
principles which had bound them together, and which 
had so far governed them. That many shared Brad- 
ford's distrust was evident from the o:rowino- conviction 
that the greater fertility of the Connecticut valley 
might support their population more compactly. So 
the Connecticut experiment was closely watched for the 
chance it might offer of a general emigration from the 
more sterile region about Plymouth Bay. 

It soon became clear that there were causes which 
were to prevent the fulfilment of any such scheme. It 
became, in 1635, plain that the Massachusetts people 
were conscious of havino; made a mistake in allowinji: 



31 

Plymonth to (jrain a footintr in that attractive reirion. 
Winthrop confesses it when he says that neither the 
Dntch nor even other Enghsh must be allowed to estab- 
lish themselves there. In the struggle which the spirit 
of this acknowledgment rendered inevitable, it was evi- 
dent that the greater population of the Bay was equal 
to the same task which in our day the North under- 
took when they measured their strength with the South 
in the colonization of Kansas. When the Dorchester 
migration, in 1635, set towards the Connecticut the 
struggle was begun, and the migration under Hooker 
soon followed. The attack was reinforced when the 
hew Connecticut patentees sent vessels up the river 
with other colonists. The Plymouth people could not 
mistake the warning which their agent, Jonathan Brew- 
ster, a Duxbury man, sent to them, in July, 1635, that 
the new-comers were occupying the land all about the 
Plymouth trading-house, — land which Plymouth had 
bought of the natives, and had taken possession of in 
due form. Remonstrance was in vain, both there by 
their agents and at Boston by their magistrates ; and 
in March, 1636, the Massachusetts people delegated 
powers for a year to magistrates appointed to govern 
their new colony of Connecticut. 

Now for u rnouieiit look at what was doing in Plymouth 
and Duxbury, in this month of March, 1636. There had 
become so general an apprehension of the risk attending 
the scattering of settlers round the bay, — and the remedy 
would become more imperative in case the Connecticut 
lands should allure large numbers, — that the matter was 
referred to Standish and other leading men whether the 



32 

Plymouth and Duxbury people should not abandon their 
present settlements and unite compactly at Jones River, 
or at Morton's Hole, as the region lying neighboring to 
the present roads from Duxbury to Kingston was called. 
The majority voted for Jones River, where Kingston now 
is, but we have no record that anything further was done. 
The reason seems to have been that the Connecticut ques- 
tion was approaching an issue. Winslow had been sent 
to Boston to adjust the dispute ; but delays ensued, till 
finally Plymouth saw that the struggle was a hopeless one, 
and in May, 1637, Thomas Prince was empowered to make 
for a consideration a formal transfer of their Connecticut 
lands — with the reservation only of a small portion lying 
about their trading-post — to an agent of the Connecticut 
people. " Thus," says Bradford, " the coutroversy was 
ended ; but the imkindness was not so soon forgotten." 
Thus, too, now that the settlements about the bay 
were not to be depleted for the Connecticut migration, 
it became a necessity to give those on the Duxbiuy 
side the form of an incorporation. 

Bradford's reference to the lingering feeling of dis- 
trust which Massachusetts had forced upon the weaker 
colony, had its manifestation very soon in the way in 
which Plymouth met the appeal of Winthrop to afford 
his people some help in the war which they quickly 
found the ambitious Pequods were bound to wage. It 
was not the first ground of affront which Plymouth had 
against the Bay Colony, and they gave its magistrates 
a pointed rejoinder. They reminded them of a few 
years before, when the French had dispossessed the 
Plymouth people of a trading-post on the Kennebec, 



33 

how Massachusetts had refused to join out of common 
interest in an attempt to recover it. They reminded 
them how they had virtually dispossessed the Ply- 
mouth people of their lands on the Connecticut ; and 
as if remembering how Winthrop had covered his refu- 
sal to join them in the Connecticut occupation by 
pleading poverty, the Plymouth magistrates now found 
that the same excuse could stand them in as good 
a stead. 

But the interests of the two peoples were too much 
intertwined for any permanent estrangement to exist, 
especially as renewed letters from Massachusetts had 
shown that a common cause in defending the Narra- 
gansetts against the Pequods was becoming more and 
more a necessity 

Thus it is that the first business done in this Court 
of the Plymouth magistrates which we are now watch- 
ing, was action taken on a further urgent request of 
Winthrop. Accordingly, the record tells us that a 
force of thirty men, with as many others as may be 
needed to manage the barque, shall be sent under 
Lieutenant William Holmes — the same who sailed his 
sloop past the cannon of the Dutch — to assist those of 
Massachusetts and Connecticut in their wars against 
the Pequods in '' revenge for the innocent blood of the 
English, which they have barbarously shed." They 
also chose by lot Mr. Thomas Prince to accompany 
the party as counsellor to the Lieutenant. There is 
much else spread upon the record, of the necessary 
provisions which the expedition required, including 
a list of such as volunteered for the service. It was 



34 

significant of the years that had passed since the 
" Mayflower " touched these shores, that among these 
wilhng soldiers appear the names of the child Henry 
Sampson, now a man of twenty-three, and Peregrine 
White, now a stripling of seventeen, who had 
been born in Cape Cod harbor. It is enough to 
add that a quick stroke mainly on the part of Con- 
necticut put an end to the war, the news whereof 
arrived in time to prevent the starting of the Ply- 
mouth quota. 

We may imagine for the next business the whole 
story of these recent events to be gone over in the 
discussion which followed the introduction, very likely 
by Standish, of the order for the incorporation of the 
new town. There may have been an enlargement 
upon the justice and necessity of the case, upon the 
passing of the opportunity which might have rendered 
necessary the drawing of the scattered population closer 
together, if the Connecticut migration had been con- 
summated ; but though Bradford as governor made 
the necessary minutes of the meeting, he has not pre- 
served to us more than the vote, which we are this 
day assembled to commemorate. " It is enacted by 
the Court that Ducksborrow shall become a towneship, 
and unite together for their better securitie, and to 
have the pv''eledges of a towne ; onely their bounds 
and limmits shalbe sett and appoynted by the next 
Court." 

And so DuxBURY became one of those little democra- 
cies which have made New England what she is ; for 



35 

her failinyrs as well as virtues can be traced to them. 
Such as it is, citizens of Duxbury, one of these Httle 
democracies is your heritage. You have met to-day 
to authenticate your title to it, and to pass it on to 
coming generations. 



3Ja15 



